Monday, June 06, 2005

3 more non-bets on climate change

He still insists he "wouldn't be surprised" if cooling occurs, but declined to make any estimate as to the likelihood of this.

Having drawn a blank with B&M's fans, I went back to the horse's arse mouth himself, and looked up Mashnich's email address (can't find Bashkirtsev). But of course, Mashnich won't back his own forecast, which is a pretty good sign as to how much he thinks it's worth. By the way, I have a copy of the B&M paper, and may post a review of it some time.

Are we in a long-term cooling trend or will the warming of the 20th century continue? Science cannot tell us

I think that science can and in fact has told us that continued warming is more likely than cooling over the next couple of decades, and offered him 2:1 odds on it. Surprise, he's not interested at any odds.

So, that's another 3 septics who loudly proclaim that the scientific consensus (as expressed in the IPCC TAR) is wrong, but are not prepared to bet against it. Funny, that. I'm running out of opponents here.

7 comments:

"So, that's another 3 septics who loudly proclaim that the scientific consensus (as expressed in the IPCC TAR) is wrong, but are not prepared to bet against it. Funny, that. I'm running out of opponents here."

So, Mark, will you step in where all these sceptics fear to tread and bet against the consensus on 20-30 year temperature changes?

I have no particular commment on things like the methane projections (note that a set of projections is not a probabilistic prediction). Maybe you are right, maybe not. One reason why I focus on the 20-30 year time scale rather than 100 years is that the difference between emissions scenarios have relatively little impact over the shorter time scale (plus, I can expect to live long enough to collect on the bet)

To my mind predicting climate change through formalized betting for or against global warming is a much cleaner and rational thing to do than messing around with Kyoto driven emissions trading. If it is done by informed ( or ill-informed parties for that matter) the consensus that is arrived at by the stakes at risk and the odds that are offerred will be a more credible measure of what observers, commentators, scientists, climate bureaucrats really think.

If we take a bench mark like Global Average Surface Temperatures ( GAST) from a reliable source of measurement( the CRU at Uni East Anglia is a bit suspect with their IPCC connections) and set future temperature targets in the next 10-20-30 years, we will have a meaningful contract on which to make financial decisions.

Emissions trading is fraught with Basis Risk - since it attempts to link CO2 emissions from an individual enterprise (or country) to global CO2 atmospheric levels and then to poorly correlated linkages between CO2 levels and the impact on GAST.

Lets do direct contracts/bets/offsets --- My wish is to see these bets become an alternative to carbon taxes and emissions trading.

It will certainly force all the promoters of climate change regulations and makers of overstated predictions to put their money where there mouths are